In memoriam: a miserable little amoral dwarf whose failed life will most likely be as quickly forgotten as it is forgettable, and whom we will not speak of by name

This guy is dead.  At least that's the news.  Maybe it's a premature report of his demise, but it's probably true.

We won't name him by name.  Not because his name has any kind of power, like Voldemort's in the Harry Potter books, but because his name has publicity, which is what his grubby little organization was all about.  There were even suggestions that his org's extreme behavior was a kind of performance art thing designed to generate income via lawsuits: show up at a funeral, provoke someone into doing something rash, sue the victim for losing his head, profit.  Nothing to do with Biblical principles or whatnot.  Seems to have worked in at least one case, though.  Publicity was always a part of that.

(I think we used to have a clever pseudonym for these people floating around, but I can't remember what it was.  Oh well.)

Starving them for publicity, anyway, is probably as good as starving them for money.  We won't mention names because, actually, yeah, naming does empower them.  Not empower them over us, but empowers them from the shadow-statehood of being a morally bankrupt and culturally irrelevant parasite.  Whether they're brigands or really just bigots, let them do it in their cavern.

We hear that the dead guy was excommunicated from the shadow org some time ago: how does that happen?  Did they disagree over legal strategies?  Did someone actually believe their own horseshit?  Who knows?  Who cares?

The late great comedienne Moms Mabley once did a bit about an ex-husband where she quipped, "They say you shouldn't say nothin' about the dead unless it's good. He's dead--good!"  It springs to mind for obvious reasons.

You wonder who's going to mourn someone like this.  Some of his family abandoned him and his organization, then his organization abandoned him.  And it isn't like there will be more flattering obituaries than the one I'm writing, that refuses to identify him by name, even.  A lot of people will be glad he's gone and the rest seem unlikely to care.

And will anyone show up at his funeral to make a scene?  Maybe, because some people will consider it too obvious a piece of poetic justice to resist.  And yet, what will that do but draw attention to him one final time?  It would be better (tho' this won't happen, either) to put him in an unmarked piece of ground, or to leave him naked in a wood to be torn to pieces by crows and foxes and recycled into the soil (if anything would grow in the place he lay and festered).  It would be better to take away not just this horrid little man's pestilential name but as much of his having-ever-existed as we could reclaim.  Certainly not an active memory-holing: no need to resort to Stalinist extremes of Photoshopping the dead man out of vacation photos; but an obfuscation by dust and amnesia, an actual forgetting of the little blighter.

There are some evil men you make a point of remembering just in case there's such a thing as reincarnation, actual or merely figurative.  Banal evil men like Richard Nixon and epically evil knaves like Adolf Hitler.  This nameless twit we have come to neither praise nor bury is nowhere along that continuum: evil, yes--he parasitized suffering and grief, and what else is that but evil?--but not someone we should worry our pretty little heads about remembering for the next time.  Anyway, we'll know his miserable heirs by the signs they carry to some other funeral.  (Or, perhaps, even to his.  Snakes have no loyalty, their brains are too small and their blood too cold for it.)  His death is nothing but a chapter closing in a book in which he was never a major character and has long since passed from being an important minor one.

Naturally, if there's a Hell, he's in it.  But so what?  He'd be a nuisance there, too.

In the dead dwarf's country, one third of the states--seventeen of fifty--and the nation's capital have legalized same-gender marriages one way or another.  This is a transformation that would have been inconceivable when I was young, an era in which merely being outted could end a career in entertainment, sports or politics and at the very least damaged one's reputation in other fields.  Celebrities are mostly candid about their sexualities; those who remain coy only do so in a flirty, "What are you really asking and who wants to know?" manner instead of responding with the raw angry panic and speed-dialing of attorneys and agents that one used to see.  Unfamous folks post pictures of their significant others on Facebook, live with them, and (in the seventeen states and District of Columbia) wed them.

The dwarf is losing, in other words; the dwarf has lost.  A tide turned and washed him away.  It is possible he died of obsolescence.  Not that there aren't hateful, awful, tiny people still around who will post tinny little echoes of the dwarf's infamous catchphrase in Twitter posts and Sunday brunch conversations; it's just that fewer and fewer people take them so seriously anymore.  A tide doesn't quite wash away clean: it leaves little puddles behind that dry out, shrivel, shrink and are gone, the wet slimy things that flopped about in the receding muck turning white and crusty with salt and their own desperation.

I don't believe in Hell, myself.  I believe when you're dead, you're dead, and that's it; except, of course, that there's still your memory around, the echo of who you hopefully were that everyone carries around with them for however long, and one hopes one leaves behind a dulcet echo that chimes for a thousand years, passed from chamber to chamber by people who remember you well and with love.  I don't see this dead guy meriting such a fate; I see his memory being a sharp, jarring, cacophonous sound that echoes only as long as people can be bothered to dance on his grave.  And then when that exhilaration wanes, well: he'll be an answer to a trivia question, at best.  A brief sentence in the comprehensive history of how love won out over insecurity and prejudice.

I wrote earlier that if there was a Hell, he'd be in it, but if there was a Hell, that isn't where I'd want him to be: I'd want the miserable little bastard to be a bodiless ghost wandering the streets and alleys of this America, watching his fool's crusade whispering off like the empty candy wrappers whisking through his feet, listening in vain for someone to remember his name or even that he ever was.

Goodnight, you little fuck.